MEMS Actuator Design and Simulation

MEMS actuators, devices that convert electrical energy to mechanical motion, comprise more than 50% of the rapidly growing MEMS market. They are used in a variety of optical, RF, and industrial applications. Examples include variable capacitors (varactors), micro-relays for low-power VLSI, optical phase-shifters, next generation displays, micro-grippers for robotic surgery, and focusing mechanisms for cameras in mobile devices.

Figure 1: MEMS actuators have a wide variety of actuation mechanisms

Design Challenges

Designers face increasing pressures to reduce both time-to-market and cost. These pressures render the traditional reliance in-house tool development and excessive building and testing obsolete. The key challenge for designers of MEMS actuators is to create a device that meets the performance criteria for force, displacement, switching time, power, size, temperature stability, and reliability. To succeed, designers must properly account for 3D electrostatic fringing, coupled electromechanics with contact, buckling, and gas damping effects.

Coventor’s platform provides significant advantages in speed, accuracy, and capacity to address these challenges. In addition, the platform enables greater team productivity by enabling rapid exploration at the device level to occur simultaneously with optimizing the control circuitry and investigating the effects of process and/or material changes.

Select and optimize device architecture
Designers first evaluate and optimize the MEMS actuator across a large number of geometric changes, materials and process tolerances that impact device performance and manufacturability. Here, simulation speed and capacity is a key advantage. The ability to rapidly explore and determine the most optimal combination from such a large number of variables will help designers avoid committing to sub-optimal and/or overly-costly approaches early in the design cycle.Coventor MEMS+ provides an excellent solution. A parametric design of the device is created using an extensive library of MEMS specific components. These components are higher-order finite elements, specially crafted to run fully-coupled multi-physics simulations extremely fast in MATLAB, Simulink, and/or Cadence Spectre. It is not uncommon for users to experience 100-to-1,000X speed advantage vs. conventional FEA approaches, making it possible to explore hundreds of process and design variations within a single day.Consider the simulation of the pull-in and lift-off instabilities of an electrostatic actuator. Simulations in conventional FEA tools may take 8 hours or more, versus a few minutes with a MEMS+ model. Transient simulations that include gas damping effects are not feasible with conventional FEA, but quite tractable with MEMS+ models.

Device level design and verification
Next, a more detailed analysis that includes the effects of anchors, packaging stress, and the impact from various damping mechanisms are evaluated. At this stage, accuracy is critical and hence Coventor’s customized FEA Tools, (Designer & Analyzer) are used to fine tune and validate the design. The specialized algorithms ensure contact electro-mechanics and relevant 3D fringing fields are considered, the solution is meshed optimally, and charge based and/or voltage-based coupled-electromechanics are available to ensure convergence on the most difficult of problems.Coventor achieves this using our proprietary Hybrid FEM & BEM solver. As stated above, this solver adaptively refines the finite element mesh used for electrostatics, providing an accurate result without burdening the user with unnecessary mesh refinement. In addition, unlike traditional FEA approaches, the air volume in Coventor’s hybrid method is not meshed. This is most significant when solving for contact hysteresis and evaluating other fine details associated with the motion and reliability of these devices. Using our approach, the simulation is more accurate, more robust, and significantly faster.

The non-linear behavior of piezoelectric and electro-thermal actuators, as seen below, can also be simulated. Designers can determine contact forces, insertion loss, transient switching time and perform shock analysis (drop-tests). Additionally, tools to simulate squeeze-film, slide-film and Stokes gas damping enable users to calibrate or verify MEMS+ models rather than relying on simple analytical formulae or experimental measurements.

Figure 5: Thermal Actuator

System-level integration and verification
MEMS actuators do not operate in isolation; they perform their tasks in the context of a system that includes an electronic circuit. Hence, prior to fabrication, the complete system needs to be simulated and tuned. To accomplish this, designers have traditionally built handcrafted, reduced-order models based on analytical expressions or extracted from FEA simulation. The problem with this approach is two-fold. First, building the reduced order models can be very time-consuming. Second, and more important, the analytical equations used are over-simplified and the reduced0order models created do not include non-linear effects. Taken together, this traditional approach significantly impacts the IC and system designers and may increase the chances of costly redesigns late in the development cycle.Coventor’s MEMS+ solution is tailored to address this need. A parametric model which includes the non-linear behavior of the mechanical MEMS actuator is created and run in the Mathworks Simulink or Cadence Spectre. System designers can evaluate the full behavior of the device including the IC circuit. They may also simulate an array of MEMS devices using this approach. Device and system variables can be parametrically varied to control linearity and perform sensitivity analysis. Designers can also simulate actuator force and displacement along with drive current/voltages and also view motion in 3D.

A Complete Platform

Coventor’s platform for MEMS actuator design and simulation is fast, accurate, and comprehensive. Using this platform, designers can simulate individual MEMS actuators and arrays together with their control circuitry. This new, integrated methodology based on MEMS-specific tools enables today’s actuator designers to optimize device performance and meet their increasingly challenging time-to-market goals.